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Please take all my comments with a grain of salt - I am a novice priest and anything I say is to be taken with a good dose of skepticism - Shodo Yugen

Great is the robe of liberation,
a formless field of benefaction
Buddhas have authentically transmitted it
ancestors have intimately received it.
Beyond wide, beyond narrow,
beyond cloth, beyond threads;
maintain it thus,
then you are the keeper of the robe.Ryokan

There is a tradition in Cornwall, and other Celtic areas, of tying colourful strips of cloth to tree branches above holy wells. There is usually one tree which is covered in bright rags. It's still done in Cornwall as a kind of offering to the tree and the well. http://www.cornwalls.co.uk/images/sites/madron_well.jpg.

Rag wells are something different than an offering to the tree and well - more an act of sympathetic magic. The rags are taking from a person who is sick or suffering and the idea is that in the presence of a holy tree and well as the rag decays and the illness is taken from that, so the person will be cured. A similar

I do love the look of the trees when they are covered with rags, though, and imagine that offerings to trees were not uncommon in animistic cultures, maybe even Japanese Shinto.

That's interesting Andy. Thanks. When I was younger and lived in Cornwall, we would tie the rags as an offering to the tree and water and the whole of nature. It's obviously changed meaning a bit over time and space...or maybe we were just a bit odd in Cornwall ;-)